21-year-old Dylann Roof, the alleged gunman that slaughtered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina church on Wednesday night is now in custody after a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina 2520 miles from the scene, police say.

The traffic stop was made after an alert citizen spotted the car that Roof was driving and reported their sighting to the police. Roof was arrested without incident.

“I am so pleased we were able to resolve this case quickly,” Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said at a news conference.

Roof, from Lexington, South Carolina, went to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street in Charleston, and spent almost an hour at the prayer meeting at the church before opening fire and killing three men and six women. During the slaughter, Roof allegedly said, “I have to do it, you rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” as his victims pleaded with him to stop.

The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, church pastor and a South Carolina state senator, were among the dead. Six other victims were identified as Rev. Sharonda Singleton, retired pastor Dr. Daniel L. Simmons, Ethel Lee Lance, Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson and  Tywanza Sanders.

In May, Roof chose as a profile picture in Facebook, an image of him standing in a landscape of a swamp with trees covered in Spanish Moss. He is pictured with a scowl on his face and wearing a jacket adorned with two symbols that are considered emblems of White Supremacists, two flags, one from South Africa during the Apartheid era and another that is a former Rhodesian flag.

Roof’s father recently gave Roof a .45 caliber handgun for his birthday, Roof’s family reports. He reloaded his weapon five times during his rampage. He was still armed with the handgun when he was arrested.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is investigating the incident and her team is working to determine if Roof should be charged with a hate crime. South Carolina does not have a hate crime law.

Senator Rand Paul said in a statement,  “What kind of person goes in a church and shoots nine people? There’s a sickness in our country. There’s something terribly wrong,” he said. “But it isn’t going to be fixed by your government. It’s people straying away, it’s people not understanding where salvation comes from.”

Rick Santorum said during an on-radio interview with New York’s AM 970 radio host Joe Piscopo, “All you can do is pray for those and pray for our country, this is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before. It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation.”

Saying that ineffective gun control laws facilitated the attack, President Obama said, “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and for healing, but let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

In Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton said during a campaign event, “How many innocent people in our country – from little children, church members, to movie theater attendees — how many people do we need to see cut down before we act? So as we mourn and as our hearts break a little more, and as we send this message of solidarity that we will not forsake those who have been victimized by gun violence, this time we have to find answers together.”

Senator from South Carolina and another presidential candidate, Lindsey Graham said of the shootings in a statement, “Our prayers are with the families of the victims and the people of Charleston. We are all heartbroken by this tragedy, to the families of the victims, please know that you are being prayed for and loved by so many in the community and across the nation. I pray that God will provide you healing in the coming days.”

Graham continued, saying, “There are bad people in this world who are motivated by hate. Every decent person has been victimized by the hateful, callous disregard for human life shown by the individual who perpetrated these horrible acts.”

The church where the shootings took place is one of the oldest black churches in the United States. It was founded in 1816 and played a role during the slavery era as well as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The church’s pastor in 1822 tried to initiate a slave rebellion, but the plot was discovered and the pastor, Denmark Vesey and he and 34 others were executed for the plot and the church was burned to the ground. It was re-built in 1834.

  african, arrest, charleston, emanuel, episcopal church, hate crime, killings, methodist, shelby, shootings dylann roof, south carolina